While there are many reasons to want to conceal only a part of one's browsing history, there's no official way to browse privately, or selectively delete, history entries on the iPhone. However, I recently discovered, through equal parts curiosity and accident, a way to achieve a similar result.

Browse to a site you'd like to keep out of your browser history, conduct your business, and then when you're done, navigate to a less-sensitive site. Then hold the Home button down until Safari "force quits" back to the iPhone's home screen. When you reopen Safari, you'll see the last page you had open, but when you check history, you'll find nothing from the last session except that page.

YouTube App works similarly, but you don't need to navigate to a new page. Once you force quit, that entire session apparently vanishes into the ether. This is more useful, for me at least. Most of us don't have prying spouses furiously scouring our phone's browser history, but anyone with kids has had to share YouTube with them. There may not be any porn on YouTube, but with my sick and childish sense of humor, there's plenty I'd like to shield my seven year old's eyes from seeing. Now I don't have to periodically clear my history.

I can't say for sure whether the Safari trick prevents cookies being stored; I guess I'll find out next time I shop for airline tickets. As this is sort of a bug, or at least not necessarily intended behavior, it may vanish with a future update. Hopefully it's a lower priority than copy/paste!

In addition to force quitting Safari, clear the History, Cookies, and Cache from the Safari section in Settings. When you open Safari, it will act as it does on a new installation. This is a method that I have been using since 1.1.1 and still works great.

The point of this hint (for me at least) is not having to clear the whole history. Private browsing on the desktop is just that: private.

Porn's the obvious one, and the punchline with the most mileage, but everybody has something(s) they don't want anybody to know, and many of them are googling it right now.

So what if I jealously google my more successful friends? Or if I'm coming down with a fatal case of WebMD-Induced Hypochondriasis Syndrome? Or maybe I don't want the airline to know what flights I'm taking a second look at, so they don't raise the fare.

It's not just 4chan or bustyladiez.org. Although, there is that too, I suppose.